Moral Time

Donald Black

Presents a powerful theory of conflict that explains why it occurs across cultures and throughout history

Continuing his long line of innovative theoretical work, Donald Black develops here for the first time a conceptualization of social time

Moral Time

Donald Black

Description

Conflict is ubiquitous and inevitable, but people generally dislike it and try to prevent or avoid it as much as possible. So why do clashes of right and wrong occur? And why are some more serious than others? In Moral Time, sociologist Donald Black presents a new theory of conflict that provides answers to these and many other questions.

The heart of the theory is a completely new concept of social time. Black claims that the root cause of conflict is the movement of social time, including relational, vertical, and cultural time--changes in intimacy, inequality, and diversity. The theory of moral time reveals the causes of conflict in all human relationships, from marital and other close relationships to those between strangers, ethnic groups, and entire societies. Moreover, the theory explains the origins and clash of right and wrong not only in modern societies but across the world and across history, from conflict concerning sexual behavior such as rape, adultery, and homosexuality, to bad manners and dislike in everyday life, theft and other crime, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, witchcraft accusations, warfare, heresy, obscenity, creativity, and insanity. Black concludes by explaining the evolution of conflict and morality across human history, from the tribal to the modern age. He also provides surprising insights into the postmodern emergence of the right to happiness and the expanding rights of humans and non-humans across the world.

Moral Time offers an incisive, powerful, and radically new understanding of human conflict--a fundamental and inescapable feature of social life.

Moral Time

Donald Black

Author Information

Donald Black is University Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is the author of six books, including The Behavior of Law, Sociological Justice and The Social Structure of Right and Wrong.

Moral Time

Donald Black

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2012 Outstanding Book Award, the Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section of the American Sociological Association

"Reading Donald Black is like reading Isaac Newton doing sociology. Clear, fundamental principles underlie the flux of particularities in which we live. In his previous work on law, crime, and morality, Black laid out the geometry of social space and showed how your morality depends on your location in social space. Now he sets the social universe in motion: Conflict is caused by movements of social time, with faster changes across bigger distances causing more severe conflict. Especially striking is Black's geometry of postmodernity, where individuals are intimate with no one but themselves, while media-connected to a global diversity of distant relationships; the result is self-conflict and self-therapy, together with a very abstract altruism toward everyone and everything. This is Donald Black's masterwork of sociological theory." --Randall Collins, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

"Moral Time is a masterpiece which involves a most effective blending of sociological theory with world ethnographic data. As a very well written and highly engaging treatment, this book sees conflict as an ongoing process that is central to human life, and has the great strength of dealing with abstract theory at the same time that it brings in rich and vivid ethnographic detail, drawn from modern and nonliterate societies alike. Black's book will be a milestone in the study of moral behavior." --Christopher Boehm, Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, University of Southern California

"Donald Black has devoted his brilliant career to developing a pure sociology that is independent of psychological, biological, or any other type of individual influences. Moral Time, a stunning theoretical and empirical synthesis of all forms of conflict, culminates his efforts. It is an instant sociological classic." --Allan V. Horwitz, Board of Governors Professor of Sociology, Dean for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Rutgers University

"With his typical boldness, Black has produced another classic. Moral Time is his attempt at a general theory of conflict, and he succeeds admirably." --Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"This is a great book, on par with or exceeding the value of Black's other classics, The Behavior of Law and The Social Structure of Right and Wrong... No amount of praise can adequately describe the respect it deserves... Moral Time represents a milestone contribution to our understanding of the wellsprings of human conflict."--International Criminal Justice Review

"Black extends his early work on social conflict by developing a new concept of social time, arguing that the root cause of conflict is the movement of social time, including relational, vertical, and cultural time." --Law & Social Inquiry

"Moral Time is an astonishing and audacious book, proposing a theory of all conflict at all times in all places. It is, quite simply, required reading for all serious students of violence, conflict, and morality." --Comptes Rendus